Last Monday, I did what everyone who transfers from driving a petrol fuelled car to a diesel fuelled car, or has a mixed fuel fleet, always dreads. I misfuelled my Alfa Romeo Giulietta. And, yes, you do feel a complete idiot when you do it.
Apparently, in the UK, 3,000 people do this every week, usually putting petrol into a diesel car. Sufficiently common, then, for the word “misfuel” to be accepted as a word in many dictionaries, with the full range of declensions. In my case, my excuse was that it was very hot, I’d just got off the train and was thinking about the supermarket trip that was to follow. Or, my excuses weren’t that great. After all, it says “DIESEL” on the cap, that cap’s black like the pump handle (petrol are green) and I’ve been driving a diesel daily driver for over 6 years. As James May would have said, “Oh cock!”. I actually said (very quietly) something worse.
The resolution is actually quite straightforward, assuming you don’t start the car, which I didn’t. A call to the RAC (like the AAA but with orange trucks and royal approval) arranged a flatbed lift home and an appointment with the Misfuelling Patrol the next morning. Incidentally, it was interesting to watch the RAC truck operator use the remote control system for the flatbed drop and winch – clearly, someone has observed and applied what they saw to this process and equipment.
The draining process (actually an extraction through the filler pipe) took about 15 minutes, with the fuel line disconnected where it met the injectors and some detergent was flushed through with a small quantity of fuel. Add a larger quantity of fuel, restart and drive to a fuel station for a correct fuelling.
Oh, and don’t forget to pay for the misfueled fuel. And don’t do it again, like my neighbour did.
So, what really basic error did you make?
My son managed to do this twice on one day. He filled his new-to-him car with diesel, then after it was towed away borrowed his mother’s car and did the same thing. He’d been driving a couple years already and should have known better, but in his defense had just started filling up and paying on his own.
The battery dies in my first car. The gas station attendent made fun of me for not putting water in the battery. I think he was mostly showing off in front of his girlfriend, you know, like putting water in a battery is a sign of manhood. So I learned how to fix cars and that pos 59 Ford gave me plenty of lessons. Now I are a man, but probably more because I raised a family, and retired in decent health than any mechanical ability I’ve aquired.
My sympathies, my previous car was diesel but I have gone back to petrol so wonder if I will ever make the same mistake.
The main reason I haven’t to date is that I can always smell diesel and I can tell a diesel car just from the exhaust fumes and the sooty smell after it has been shut down, its like you can taste it in the air as well
Often the pumps have been splashed with diesel when people overfill as the smell or the stains seem to linger forever
The smell was one of my pet hates when driving diesel and I wish the pumps did not dispense both diesel and petrol, if I see that stain on the floor I will use another pump or drive on. Just standing on it while filling up is enough to get the smell on the soles of your shoes and it fills the car when you get back in
I might just be over sensitive to this fuel as I do not notice it with petrol, Does anyone else notice this to the same extend as me I wonder
My wife got where she didn’t want to ride in my TDI New Beetle because of the odor (she’s sensitive to odors, tho). The ’13 Beetle TDi that followed it was “scent free,” though.
I remember hearing complaints when unleaded petrol first became a thing here, that some people felt sickened by the smell. To me it was different, but not a problem. Same with diesel: unpleasant but not to the point of sickness.
I never knew leaded gasoline exhaust had a different smell. I guess I’ll never know what it is…..
If you ever fueled your car in the U.S., you’d really struggle because here the diesel pump handles are green and the gasoline (petrol) are black. Of course, we drive on the wrong side of the road and there aren’t many diesel passenger cars available, so everything’s backward. And I’ve never seen a “misfuel” service van, though I did once have a partner at work who put gas in our diesel truck, then drove it about a hundred miles before it quit running.
Also here in America the nozzle dia is different. I forget which is tho.
FWIU the narrow one is (unleaded) gasoline. That was introduced with catalytic converters, to prevent people from using leaded gas in them. Now that leaded gas is extinct (good riddance) only diesel uses the wide nozzle.
Not all stations are like this, though. Some use the same size nozzle for both fuels.
I always thought the diameter was different too, but apparently not different enough as I posted above.
I almost misfueled a rental car twice while on vacation in the UK specifically because green handles are petrol there. Luckily the black diesel nozzle wouldn’t fit in the car.
BP uses green handles on petrol/gasoline in the States which always confuses me into thinking I picked up the wrong handle, but they’re both green. Kind of like that old Monty Python album where upon putting it on the turntable you realize it’s Side 2, so you flip it over but that one’s also Side 2..
I thankfully made it 12+ years and over 128K miles with the TDI New Beetle without doing this, although I came close a couple times. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever had to call a tow truck (although I have had to call friends a time or two).
Probably my most embarrassing moment was trying a “rev it up and drop it in drive” burnout with my V6-powered ’71 Vega, which instantly shattered the pinion gears in the rear end. Oh, did I mention I chose to do this in front of a frat house at Georgia Tech?
A friend swore he once saw a friend of his show off his freshly rebuilt ’57 Chevy V8 with three-on-the-tree. Wound it out in first, speed-shifted into second, missed second, hit reverse and popped the clutch. The whole underside of the car exploded. Bent crank, destroyed gearbox and rear end, plus whiplash.
I’d like to have seen that!
Driving my ‘83 Toyota Hi-Lux (3/4 ton version) one rainy night back in the 80s (yes, alcohol was involved); I dropped it into reverse and dumped the clutch while doing about 45mph on a downhill grade. Good lord! The drive wheels went into reverse, while still traveling forward at 45 mph with some of the loudest screeching I’ve ever heard. The truck slowly came to stop, then proceeded, slowly, to reverse itself, still screeching the tires as loudly as possible several car lengths, then, after locking up the brakes several yards, I dropped it back in 1st, dumped the clutch, and burned more rubber while turning right onto a street at the bottom of the grade, Being a quiet, upper class neighborhood in the wee hours, it just had to have woken up the entire surrounding block. But…I was long gone! That deliberate and severe abuse did not faze that Toyota. Not one iota.
My father put diesel by mistake in the Astro van one time on a 1000 km trip from Calgary to Vancouver Island. He quickly realized his mistake and kept it topped off with gas the rest of the trip. It amazingly made out to the island at which point we had fun trying to drain the tank out. The anti siphoning valve is great to keep the crack heads from stealing your fuel but make getting the gas out a pain in the you know where.
Somewhat common in my past life as a fleet manager. It seems that a least once year one of my new drivers would unscrew the cap to the hydraulic tank on a Moffett (piggyback forklift) and pump several gallons of diesel into it. All very clearly marked and a real pain to drain/flush system.
Did that once with a ’76 Ford F150. The guy that rode to work with me filled the truck while I went inside to pee. Paid, came back out and left. Got about a mile down the road and it began to sputter. Made an interesting smell. Fortunately for our heroes, the truck had been fitted out with two auxiliary gas tanks. I just flipped the lever, and it started running again. I carried around that tank of diesel for several months before I got around to draining it.
Me? Never!!
When I was about 14 I decided to check the fluids under the little hinged part of the grill in the front of dads brand new 1972 19ft Winnibago Brave class A motorhome. The engine was between the front seats, but up front was a long tube and dipstick for the engine, and a radiator tube and cap along with the same arrangement for adding oil or coolent. Checked oil with the dipstick, right up to snuff. Removed the radiator cap, couldn’t see any so stuck my finger inside, it was low so figured I’d top it off with the garden hose. After about 20 seconds, still not filling up. Then noticed another radiator cap, took it off, coolent was right to the top. It also said “radiator”. The first cap I removed said “oil”. I pulled out the dipstick, chocolate milkshake all the way to the top of the dipstick.
Myself, I’ve never done such a thing. That’s good.
My father once mis-fueled in his ‘62 Falcon. In his defense, the fuel distributor had filled the gasoline tank with diesel. He said it ran but did cough a lot. This was about 1963.
More recently I learned of another such situation. A fuel supplier filled up the bulk tanks at a DOT facility but filled the gasoline tanks with diesel. The highway patrol also taps into this fuel source. Let’s just saw new Chargers don’t like diesel and this new car had a new engine installed.
I put kerosene for our camping lanterns and cook stove in my dirt bike from an unlabeled can in the family garage once. It ran fine for a mile or two, then ran badly while smoking like I’d seafoamed it and then died. I pushed it back home cursing all the while. Figured out the problem after some thought, drained the kero, took off the carb and let the float bowl drip and put the proper gas in it. It smoked for a few minutes and then ran fine. I suppose I might have rustproofed the gas tank and top end a little…
Probably my dumbest error in this department is forgetting to put any sort of fuel in the car. I have a tendency to price watch and run the tank low waiting for the price to drop.
On a couple of occasions I have had to head out of town suddenly and forgotten the tank is on fumes with the usual results.
I ran out of gas once when I was a teenager. I can’t remember why, but I was trying to put off filling the tank until a particular day. The needle was all the way on E, but I told myself that the “low fuel” idiot light, which I assumed was something all cars had, hadn’t come on yet, so it couldn’t be *that* low. So on the day I was intending to buy gas I got in the car and drove away and didn’t even get to the end of the block before the engine died. As you probably guessed, my car didn’t actually have a low fuel idiot light. Luckily we lived at the bottom of a hill, so I was able to coast back home.
What kind of a car did you have, O WildaBeast, that didn’t have the ‘Low Fuel’ warning light?
I don’t have a ‘Low Fuel’ idiot light in my aging FORD. The fuel gauge mechanism does work but it is a very inexact measurer of how much fuel is actually in the tank. It holds 13.2 gallons of gas according to the owner’s manual. As of 7/17/18 I’ve yet to run out of gas in almost 29 years of driving it . . .
Stupidest thing I’ve ever done in relation to fuel: I ran into a gas tank at a station once. That was embarrassing. I tried to make a sharp turn with my Falcon at said gas station. I failed.
Without fully understanding the gas gauge after I bought my Corvette (thinking it worked much the same as the one on my Seville, where “Empty” means “Get gas you fool but you’re fine for a few miles,” when instead “Empty” means “you’ll be screwed in maybe a quarter mile”) I ran it out of gas on the way home from work about a mile from home.
Then a few months later I did the same thing with my significant other on Massachusetts turnpike about a mile from a gas station, but I’m not counting that because we used the time to watch TV on my tablet so even though it was significantly dumber of me to do the second time we still made the best of it.
Fuel related, half my fault and half this particular stations fault. I filled up in downtown Chicago at an unfamiliar station, locked the nozzle and let if fill from a quarter tank, which is always about 14 gallons in my Cougar, and the pump at this place was particularly slow, so I just leaned on the passenger door and texted while I waited. Minutes later I moved my foot and heard a slosh sound like I stepped in a puddle, and I sure did. Looked to my right and a waterfall of fuel was gushing out of my tank and the pump display said 16 gallons, so at least two gallons of Chicago gas lost, when fuel costs were still ridiculous, in 93 octane no less, two ruined sneakers and a quarter panel soaked in fuel due to that defective nozzle. I took off my shoes got in the car and high tailed it from the station to the nearest car wash, and anxiously listened for a boom and sirens behind me. I never leave the nozzle unattended ever since.
Not my mistake thankfully, but I used to work on a dairy farm and the owners son was a major stoner. One day he decided to fuel up one of the tractors from the 500 gallon off road diesel tank that was just filled. So he locked the nozzle to fill it and ran over to his house next door to grab a sandwich. With his belly full he sat down on the couch and fell asleep. Guess what? The automatic shutoff on the nozzle didn’t shut off. Yep, 500 gallons of fuel minus what the tractor held, gone! Not at all out of character for him.
Not exactly a mistake of mine, but 20 years or so ago my brother had a circa 1970 Olds Cutlass. The battery post had separated from the lead plates below, so he had a 16 penny nail holding them close together. When the car wouldn’t start, he resorted to banging on the top of the post with a hammer. I had started backing away when (BANG!) the battery exploded. Fortunately, no one was injured, but the sleeve of my dad’s jacket ended up with many tiny pinholes! My cautious nature was again rewarded…
LOL, amazing what we used to do to get thru life!
Given that the RAC has a dedicated van labeled, “Misfuel Rescue,” I believe you when you say that 3,000 Brits misfuel their vehicles every week!
Yeah these misfuels happen but when I did it I only put 15 litres petrol in so just topped it up with diesel and drove the car it didnt run very well but it did run and I just kept topping it up until dilution made it run better, but this was a Injector pump diesel 90 Toyota not a modern common rail type motor,
Back when my oldest was in Middle School, and I was getting ready to run him in, my wife said “honey, why don’t you take my car!”
We get out in the garage, get in, and I mutter “empty or dirty. Or both.” Turn the key, and the fuel light comes on. Son looks surprised and sez “but dad, how did you know?”
Anyone that’s been married for more than a couple of years knows the answer to that question.
If it helps any, fuel delivery drivers sometimes do this as well, it’s called crossdropping. Obviously their mistake can have effects on many customers if not caught. Worse possible consequences still with aircraft fueling.
The recovered mixed fuel is called trans-mix and is sold cheaply to refineries who run it through to separate them out. So there are times when a truck delivers fuel to a refinery.
In the news, oddly enough: https://www.wavy.com/10-on-your-side/diesel-fuel-dispensed-from-regular-grade-pump-at-several-sam-s-club-costco-stores/1302313133?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark
I think Costco would be on the hook for a few injector cleanings after that.
My most stupid mistakes in my mind involve curbing rims. I’ve done it once with each of my last three cars. Immediately had the damaged wheel(s) refinished each time as I was so embarrassed.
+1…
Mid 80’s in a 1965 uBus, gas hose same as diesel (single) hose. Not paying attention, of course I put in diesel… No RAC in Austin TX so I drained the diesel into the curb drain (take that (!) you watershed, you!) & refilled w/petrol – uBus drove away just fine. Never again.
In 1960 I was a new apprentice helping install the electrical equipment in vast aircraft hanger at the Waterkloof Air Force base in Pretoria. a few of us drove to and fro from our workshop about a 100km. Round trip. on a certain day we arrived at the base and noticed we had forgot to fill up, it was Wednesday and at 1pm. Each Wednesday the base shut down for sport activities, except for a few lazy guards. I had seen that when the old Dakota,s flew a tecnitician would drain some fuel out of the wing tanks to remove any possible water in the tanks After all personal had gone sport I found a 4 gallon drum and drained 4 drums of green aviation fuel and topped up the old 1942 Dodge pick up. The Dodge pulled like it had V8 with twin turbo,s and we loved it. We did this on 3 Wednesday’s and the engine blew it top.
Adding octane to fuel doesn’t increase performance. Perhaps the water was steam cleaning the heads and valves…
Oh, yeah. Back in the mid-‘90s I had an ’87 Porsche 911 Carrera coupe. An old high school buddy was in town visiting and I took him out for ride. I went up around an entrance ramp to a busy major thoroughfare and got on it thinking I’d get in front of oncoming traffic when I realized I’d not be able to make out in front of a line of cars in the near lane and safely merge onto to road. So I backed off. And…well, you know what old 911s do when you lift the throttle abruptly in mid-turn. I should’ve known better. We did a 360 faster than you can say “oh s*$t”, right then and there in front of God and rush hour traffic, fortunately avoided same and not impacting anything else except my ego. On we (I) went, a little embarrassed but still in one piece. Lesson learned.
In the late ’70s I was a soil surveyor (among other things) for a central Florida engineering firm – my first “career” job. I drove lots of 4WD trucks offroad. One day I decided to cross a dry sandy ravine in a company 4WD Chevy Suburban. Smart move. The truck got stuck crosswise in the ravine suspended by the bumpers and all four wheels off the ground. Fortunately I had shovels and pickaxes in the back of the truck. I spent the next two hours digging away – first to get the wheels on the ground, then to dig a ramp to successfully drive out. First off I was a long way from a phone to call for help. Second of all, there was no way in hell I was going to call the office and tell them I got their truck stuck – I’d never hear the end of it from my bosses and coworkers.
I have done lots of stupid things. Fortunately the worst of them involving fuel was my mistakenly choosing E-15 instead of regular for the last tank on the return leg of a trip this past weekend. A big drop in range for the Sedona.
Having fueled thousands of rental cars as part of my job, and latterly owning 1 petrol and 1 diesel car concurrently, I fully expected to “misfuel” at some point – it seems just like something I would do, but I never did. I recently moved to the US, and the pump colour coding is indeed reversed but no problems so far.
As a truck driver I got into too many mishaps to mention – more than one instance of sinking in quarries and construction sites springs to mind.
The one which embarrasses me most was my tendency when on local flatbed deliveries, to get to a site and be unable to find my Stanley knife. I would put it down on the truck then drive off and forget about it. A colleague lost a car off the back of a transporter so I guess that’s slightly worse.
My dumbest wasn’t a mechanical mistake but it was pretty dumb. I was on a motorcycle vacation trip with my girlfriend (now wife) when we lived in Japan. Traffic was heavy but had been moving nicely until it suddenly slowed to a crawl – slow enough that being two-up on the bike was a lot of work but just fast enough you couldn’t rest with a foot down now and then. Getting hot and impatient, I finally saw a gap in traffic about six or eight cars ahead. I snap-rolled the bike into the opposite lane, dropped down a gear and grabbed a big handful of throttle. I hit 110 KPH (roughly 70 MPH) in that short stretch; easy on my Kawasaki 750. At exactly the place I pulled back into my lane, a Japanese policeman jumped out into the road and made me pull to the side of the road.
The reason traffic was moving so slowly was that the police had set up a roadside radar gun to enforce a stretch of 40 KPH (roughly 25 MPH) speed limit. They actually were set up with a little tent and a sign and very plainly visible; they had no intention of actually catching anyone – and they didn’t except for one idiot foreigner….. who was too dumb to figure out that there must be a good reason traffic was suddenly crawling.
I bet you heard ‘bakayaro gaijin’ a lot there 🙂
When I replaced one of my driveshafts (cv joint clicking) in my 1995 Mazda Protege ES, I decided to replace the ball joints. Why not, they bolt right in, I was there anyway, and it had 130K miles? Cheap insurance.
There were two versions of the ball joint for that year, one with a larger shank. Guess which ones I installed? My first clue should have been that the joint slid into the pinch bolt a bit too easily.
I got approximately 2 blocks during the test drive before they pulled out of the spindle. Best part? I pulled the inner cv joint apart on the other side and now had to replace *that* driveshaft too.
Also Fueling Related:
In my mid-twenties in my ’83 T-Bird after an intense calculus final, my head still buzzing from all the math, I was gassing up at a HESS Station on my way back home.
I pulled away from the pump with the hose nozzle still inserted into my fuel filler. Oops.
It made quite a mess. The gas station owner was kind though when I offered to pay for the damage, and only charged me for half of the hose’s replacement cost.
I think I was more upset with myself over having to pay for the several gallons of gas that came gushing out of the pump before we could hit the emergency cutoff, than paying for [half of] the busted hose. Such as waste of precious fuel. Of course this was the mid-eighties when gas hit a very nice low, price-wise, so I suppose it could have been worse.
Buried the right rear tire of my brother’s ‘70 Plymouth Fury axle-deep in a mud hole on my maiden voyage after getting my driver’s license.
My buddy & I managed to get the car out OK, but it was caked with mud. The owner of the local carwash must’ve felt like he hit a Vegas jackpot when he collected the coins that day!
When I was the little lad in this picture “driving” my first car, I tried to imitate Dad in a way that could have been disastrous. We had two cars, a truck, and a tractor at our country home so Dad had his own gasoline supply delivered and self-fueled all the vehicles. The hose handle was placed too low and somehow I got hold of it and started filling this little blue car, ending up soaked in gasoline from head to toe. Fortunately Dad saw me from a distance, immediately crushed his cigarette, ran and grabbed me up for a thorough shower with the garden house before a good scrubbing in the tub. As a kid I always loved the smell of gasoline so I’m sure that was an added attraction.
My Citroen CX25 GTi wouldn’t start when I tried to leave the supermarket. Called the RAC, and when the guy arrived he pointed out that I’d left the transmission in Drive (it was the only automatic car I’ve ever owned).
Severe damage to my ego, but fortunately not to the car.
Oh, hey, I know a version of that song with more explicit lyrics:
When I was a freshman in high school, My folks bought my sister (who was a senior at the same school) a brand-new VW Jetta. Nominally it was their car and she was just allowed to use it, but practically speaking, it was her car. We lived at 5,500 feet elevation, and it was a 1.8 litre 8-valve automatic with a sunroof and aircon…zero to sixty in forty-five minutes on those occasions it was running and drivable.
But I digress. The main element of the not-actually-her-car charade was that she was allowed to drive it to school if she took me along. One day not long after its purchase, I finished up classes early and thought I’d go sit in the brand-new car, play the radio, read through the owner’s manual, etc. She had one or another of her after-school activities, so I wouldn’t be catching a ride home with her that day. I didn’t have a key, but she’d left the sunroof open a few inches so I used my backpack as a stepstool, reached through the sunroof, and unlocked the door. No alarm system to make noise, no immobiliser to worry about.
Access attained! All fourteen-and-a-half of me, within tasting distance of being able to drive, thought sitting in the driving seat and operating the controls of even a nonrunning car seemed a very fine thing indeed.
When it came time to go catch the bus home, I left my backpack in the back seat so I wouldn’t have to lug it from the bus stop to the house. But I carefully erased any trace I’d been in the driving seat: I turned off the radio, put the seat back where my sister had left it, stashed the glovebox manual back in its pouch in the glovebox, etc.
I got home on the bus and went out for a long bike ride. When I got back, mother was waiting for me, and there was all but steam coming out of her ears. She was furious! I’d run down the battery in the car, she said. The car wouldn’t start, she said. Sister was stranded in the school parking lot, she said.
I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but I think mother drove us over to the school (’84 Caprice), screaming at me the entire way. As soon as I drew up to the Jetta, I saw the problem: so lost had I been in my own little world, blasting down mental motorways, passing and changing lanes, that I had failed to shift back into “Park”. Once thus shifted, the car started immediately.
Teenagers are a lot like cats: They eat a lot. They sleep a lot. They do random things for no reason. And while they like to have fun, they find it profoundly embarrassing to get caught having fun. And I got triple de luxe intergalactic caught. My sister enjoyed it entirely too much. There must’ve been a thousand variants of “You still have a year
before you have any business sitting in the driving seat, Daniel! You’re still only 14!”.
Was I at least out of trouble? All’s well that ends well, and all that? Ohhhhh, no. I was in much, much deeper trouble, because not only had I inconvenienced my sister and my mother, but by the time dad got home from work the two of them had upgraded the event to my having broken into the car. Every time they told the story, my crime grew markedly more heinous. And it was their combined word against mine; I stood no chance.
Dad marched me out to the driveway and demanded I demonstrate exactly how I’d got into the car. Mother and sister came along as spectators and hecklers. But it wasn’t to be; the driveway was sloped, so the backpack wouldn’t sit at the same angle as it had in the car park at school. And it had a different mix of books and stuff in it, stacked in a different order that wasn’t conducive to use as a stepstool. Those were summarily disallowed as factors. Somehow or other I eventually managed to wriggle my way up on my belly on the roof and reach in through the sunroof, whereupon another charge was added by the prosecution: dad saw the spring-loaded sunroof wind deflector folding down under my weight and declared this as damage.
I don’t recall what the penalties were, and that’s probably best, but whatever they were, they certainly were.
I remember that both my 2014 Jetta SportWagen TDI and 2015 Golf SportWagen TDI had misfueling guards, to prevent a (smaller) gasoline nozzle from being used. Fortunately, I always remembered they were diesel and never had to test that out.
You’ve got me curious: it’s obvious how a larger (diesel) nozzle won’t fit in a smaller (unleaded gasoline) filler hole, but what is the nature of these guards you mention, to prevent a small nozzle fitting in a large hole?
Further to the first Jetta story I posted ☝︎up there a few☝︎:
The very first time I was allowed to drive by myself, I got in my folks’ year-old VW Jetta, carefully buckled in and checked my mirrors and seat adjustment and carefully drove to the shopping mall to put in a job application at Brookstone. I found a space in the parkade, carefully angle-parked, gave in the application, got back in the car, buckled in, carefully checked all around again, released the brake, and carefully reversed out of the spot while carefully steering the wrong direction. Krunch, etc.
Instantly the parkade was full of people who hadn’t been there before, and of course they were all looking at me—even the ones I couldn’t see. I put the car back in Park, set the brake, shut it off, unbuckled, walked round to look: I had hit a concrete post with the right front corner of the car. Front bumper off its mount, sidemarker light smashed. Other bent-looking parts, but no crumpled metal or leaking fluids or dragging pieces. Completely driveable, but I’m completely mortified: see this what I’ve done! The first, the very first time out, and see this what I’ve done! Adjectives don’t describe the degrees of shame and failure I felt.
I just sat there for awhile, but eventually had to leave the parking space (and not be gone so long as to cause worry by exceeding the “flight plan”, in those wired-phone days), so I hyper-carefully, slowly drove home. First exchange when I walked in the front door, I had to say “I kinda had an accident with the car”. Anybody hurt? No. Crash with another car? No. I explained what had happened, we all went outside to look, my folks spoke with me about what had gone wrong, we all agreed it was a matter of pure inexperience, the car got fixed—it wasn’t anywhere near so awful as I’d felt—and life went on. To this day, I am extra-conservative when doing parking manœuvres!
My folks and I did absolutely everything we could to avoid the krunch: they decided when they’d watched me drive long enough to be reasonably confident in my abilities, they decided with me where I’d go, and within what approximate timeframe. Me, I did all the pre-trip checks systematically and carefully, and I paid attention to what I was doing. I just didn’t have the muscle memory, gainable only by experience, that would have warned me the wheels were turned the wrong way relative to where I was looking/going, nor the task experience to automatically devote a portion of my attention to keeping track of where the wheels are pointed. No matter how many or few hours of driver training, there are aspects of operator performance (i.e., driver behaviour) that improve only with hours of experience.
And they reacted to the krunch in a thoughtful, reasonable manner: they didn’t freak out, they didn’t inflate its seriousness beyond what actually happened, but did discuss in detail what happened, and why, and how variants of the same situation could result in much worse outcomes, and how to avoid that kind of lapse in future. We decided together when it was time for another try. I don’t recall there being much of a delay on that; this was not really the sort of lesson that could be meaningfully enhanced with punitive or arbitrary discipline.
The biggest problem was the difference between their shitty reaction to my (non-)”theft” of the car in the high school car park versus their thoughtful reaction to actual damage I inflicted on the car.
In my fifty plus years of driving I have never misfueled a vehicle. I’m sure that this is due to the only diesel powered vehicles I’ve ever driven were U.S. Army tactical vehicles and it was pretty obvious that they needed diesel.
The list of stupid things I have done with/in/to cars is way too long to repeat here; it might make a good article, “Idiocies of a Lifetime”. One that still stands out is the time I was driving a friends car and thought it was a great time to show everyone how to speed shift from first gear to second. As it turned out the transmission didn’t make it all the way into second gear, fortunately the only damage was a messed up shift linkage. It was a pleasant evening and the five mile walk back to civilization wasn’t the hardship my companions made it out to be.
Let’s see, what other stupid mistakes have I made? Well, a fuelling-related one: I was taking a dear friend back to the airport after his visit to town, staying at our place. The previous day I’d noticed the fuel getting low, but I hadn’t filled up because the only station on that trip’s route was a BP, and at that time they were right in the middle of denying responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, so I was trying to avoid giving them any money.
With friend on the passenger side of the front seat, the car about half a mile from the departures dropoff, and the fuel gauge near but still above the E, the car stalled and wouldn’t restart: outta gas. He missed his flight. I was deeply ashamed. He went to great effort trying to assure me he wasn’t mad, it was just one of those things, he’d had a great time, there’d be another flight, etc. But Southern veneer-of-nice is a thing; I never heard from him again.
I’ll make this short because it’s late and I need to go to sleep. I worked on an air ambulance several years ago. We had 2 Kingair’s a Leer 35 and a Piper Navajo. Took an hour flight from Atlanta to South Georgia in the Navajo to assess a patient that we were going to be flying to India in the Leer a few days later. We landed at a very small airport and asked the one person who was working to top off the fuel. Went to the hospital, took care of that, went back to the airport and fired up the engines. Taxied to the runway, did NOT do an engine run up, and hit the runway. Took off and climbed to about 1800 feet when the pilot said “we are loosing manifold pressure on the right engine”. That didn’t mean anything to me really because I didn’t understand that much about plane engines. About 5 seconds later the pilot said “F@$& ME!” that part I understood very clearly. I was sitting up front in the copilot seat and turned my head and looked out the window and saw oil spewing out of the right engine. I also noticed that the propeller was no longer turning. I don’t think anything else was said at that point. I just started praying and remember the plane banking hard to the right as we turned around and headed back to the runway we had just left. It felt like it was taking forever to get back. When we were making our approach and were about 800 feet from the runway, the left engine joined the right. It began smoking bad sounded awful. I don’t remember now if it was still running or not when we touched down but I know it wasn’t running by the time the plane came to a stop on the runway. There’s more to this story that happened between that point in time and 9 hours later at 4:00am in the morning, but I’ll skip over that for now. At 4:00 I’m the morning, that one person who had been working at that airport, called our dispatch center and informed one of the dispatchers that she had accidentally put some jet fuel in the plane instead of av gas. I suppose she was hoping that it wasn’t enough to cause problems and that she would just get away with the mistake. So, why the pilot didn’t do an engine run up before taking off, I’m not sure. Because he almost always did, but if he had, I’m pretty sure the engine failure would have occurred right after we would have been airborne and that could have ended much worse!
“remember the plane banking hard to the right”
Wait, the pilot turned into the dead engine?? That’s like a boat anchor just dying to pull you into an unrecovable spin. And with an unfeathered prop too.
An engine failure just after unstick would have been much worse depending on what was in front of the runway. Hopefully the FBO replaced both engines with nice new zero time ones…
Your very correct sir, he turned left, I was tired when I wrote that last night. But I clearly remember seeing the wing go up on my side. Yes, they did replace both engines. The right engine had just gone through a major service too and this was the first flight since we had gotten it back. They even paid for that service. So I guess all in all we (the company) came out ahead.
Automotive boners….
Fuel wise I once mistakenly put in racing fuel (100 octane) into my truck by mistake by picking up the wrong hose. It was the first time I’d ever experienced a two-hosed pump and neither being diesel. About half-way in refilling my 14 gal tank, I noted that the $ amount was getting ridiculously high for the amount of fuel infused, and was getting set to go inside and complain of being ripped off for regular. Then I saw that I picked up the wrong nozzle. I topped off the tank with regular to dilute the excess octane. I was out a few bucks, but there was a principle involved. All that octane wasted on an I4.
When I drove out to California in 1990 to start a research fellowship, I drove my completely loaded down ’82 Toyota SR-5 longbed (with campertop) from Madison, WI and drove almost straight through (a 4 hour break in Laramie, but couldn’t sleep). I pulled into Reno right at sun up, feeling more dead than alive. Gassed up my truck and went inside to buy more cola and settle the bill. Just as I was about to put it in gear, the attendant was suddenly banging on my window. So I stopped. He went to the other side of my truck and took the gas nozzle out of my filler pipe and holstered it back in the pump. Major embarrassment, but thanks to his quick action, avoided a major catastrophe. That was the only time I ever did something like that, and I blame my youthful ego of trying to push through to San Francisco. I did 2075 miles in 44 hours and was barely coherent when I pulled into my faux aunt’s place. Next year I planned my cross-country trip from SF to Boston a bit better and with less stuff in my truck.
My thankfully unwitnessed boner was the year before which I was sharing a house. The driveway ran along side the house to the back yard from the street, but it was elevated relative to the driveway next door by about 3 feet (my driveway was more like filler held in by a concrete retaining wall); there was no guard rail or fence at the edge of my driveway, it was a free fall. For the first 3 months it wasn’t a problem, but one weeknight when I was post-call at the hospital (36 hours straight with little sleep), I was home and parked, but was dead-tired, had a beer, and then a hankering for something to eat as the cupboard was bare. It was twilight and starting to sprinkle, so got in my truck out back and started driving to the street … and suddenly the right front end just dropped and I heard the frame hit the retaining wall, scraping as I quickly came to a halt. I had partly driven off the driveway with the RF wheel just hanging in the breeze. The headlights were still on, the motor running so got out in the mild drizzle to assess the situation. The frame was fine, but I couldn’t go backwards or forwards. Now what? And thinking along the lines of “what good will calling a tow service do to get my truck off the wall?” and other thoughts of panic. But remembering something from an episode of “Combat!” (Vic Morrow’s TV series in the 1960s), I got my jack out and managed to lift the frame some for clearance, and then scrounged around the shed out back (it was a rental) and around the house itself, and used some loose bricks, some thick wood, and a 2×4 to fashion a ramp between this makeshift tower and the retaining wall, and then settled the hanging tire onto the ramp. And in the dark and light rain, backed my truck while hearing my entire set-up collapse as I got the RF wheel back onto the driveway on the first try. The whole thing took about 30 minutes and got my truck back on the road. I cleaned up my mess (“always leave a clean worksite”), put away my jack, dried off my face and went for some takeout. None of my roommates were home, and so I didn’t have to explain this example of bad driving.
I’m sure there are others, but this is bad enough.
One of my first driving lessons, in a 2005 or so Mitsubishi Lancer. I was driving on the highway and it had just a terrible shifter (detents close together). Well, I put it into reverse. At around 45 mph. I quickly shifted back to 5th after a brief, graunching noise. No damage to the car.
In my defence, I’d just started learning to drive and in my Astra, you lifted a ring and pushed the stick all the way to the far left. The Lancer was completely different and objectively worse.
As Clarkson would say, how hard can it be?
Not long after I first passed my test I found my little ’89 Panda with a flat tyre one morning.
I hurriedly swapped out the deflated wheel for the spare, hoping not to make my sis and me any later for school than we habitually were (if you’ve ever watched opening scene of Four Weddings, you’ve seen *every* weekday morning when I was driving us to school, neither of us are morning people even now) and somehow neglected to reattach the bolts.
Pulling off the drive and feeling the nearside front wheel fall off was… memorable, and needless to say there was even more swearing that morning than usual.